Posts tagged ‘she loves life’

Cougars are all the rage for men in their twenties through forties (although the latter are kidding themselves—they’re no young cubs). But just what is it about women in the 40 plus group that is such a turn on? You’ll thrive in the game of dating younger men if you can pin that down, and if you can avoid the bad behavior of your fellow 40-plus felines.

DON’T TRY TO DRESS LIKE YOU’RE TWENTY

Trying to dress like you’re half your age makes you look twice your age. You probably don’t have the abs you used to back in the day, so get acquainted with flowy tops. The good news is your girls probably grew with age and maybe a little weight gain elsewhere. Show ‘em off!

DON’T TRY TO KEEP UP WITH POP CULTURE

Play the music you like when he comes over, suggest movies from your youth on movie night, and for goodness sake do not keep up with the Kardashians. One of your cub’s favorite things about you is you’ve got “vintage” style. He wants to know what’s interesting and popular in your age group.

DON’T TRY TO PARTY TOO HARD

Men look for class in cougars. Don’t try to keep up with a young buck by suddenly wanting to go out all throughout the week and drink hard after work. Your body won’t bounce back the same; and if he wanted a party girl, he’d be with one, instead of you.

DON’T MOMMY HIM

Don’t correct his grammar, or fact-check him when he’s engaged in conversation, or wipe his mouth. The last thing he’ll want to do is have sex with someone who reminds him of his mother.

DON’T PAY FOR EVERYTHING

Let him feel like a man and treat you, too. The greatest thing about dating someone younger is that he has so many places to show you that you’d never know about otherwise, and visa versa. So, try this: when you suggest a place, you pay. And when he suggests one, he pays.

DON’T BE TOO BOSSY IN BED

A cub will like that you know what you’re doing. He won’t like if you imply he doesn’t know what he’s doing. If there are certain things you need to happen in bed, present them in a way so it’s fun for both of you, and not just all in service of your big O.

DON’T TALK TOO MUCH ABOUT YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

You’ve had a longer life and inevitably accomplished more than your cub. It’s natural to reference your own history, experiences, victories etc. in conversation, but you have to watch it around a cub. He’s insecure to begin with: don’t provoke that.

BUT DON’T DOWNPLAY YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Don’t completely stay quiet about what you’ve done! Part of what attracts a young guy to an older woman is all her knowledge and experience about careers, travel, relationships and life in general.When he asks you about your history, don’t be afraid to share.

DON’T GET CATTY AROUND YOUNGER WOMEN

Like a crop top or too much makeup, catty behavior instantly ages you. So long as you see your age as an advantage, so will your cub. But he can smell it the second you feel insecure about your age, and being catty to younger women is the first symptom.

DON’T KNOCK THE YOUNG SPOTS

Your cub is going to take you to places that are too loud, too crowded, too simple, too cheap, too dirty—you name it. But there’s a reason he likes those places. Be open to what that reason may be.

ACCEPT YOUR CURVES

Too many cougars hit the gym obsessively, whittling their bodies down to nothing but bone. That doesnot look good on an older woman. Curves come in beautifully on the 40-plus group. And to a cub, that type of body isn’t a turn off—it’s different and exciting.

DON’T JUDGE HIM

He won’t know as much about money management or interior design or even table manners as you do. His apartment might be messy and his resume might be all botched up. Just remember: so was yours when you were his age.

DON’T HIDE YOUR KIDS!

If you lie about having children or send them away to visit their aunt anytime your cub comes over, everybody will feel guilty. Your guy will feel guilty that your kids have to scram when he’s around, and you’ll feel guilty about hiding your pride and joy!

DON’T DUMP ON MEN YOUR AGE

A younger man wants to feel that you’re approaching the concept of dating younger men from a positive place. He wants to feel that you see what is special about him, and not just how he is the opposite of everybody else you’ve dated. Refrain from complaining about men your age.

Cooking doesn’t get more primal and exciting than this. For centuries, the bedouins have been burying hot coals and meat in the desert sand and letting it cook, slowly. What comes out of the hole many hours later is the most seductive aroma and tenderest lamb imaginable. But you also get to learn an ancient lesson in cooking, hospitality and survival in one of the world’s harshest environments.

Sushi that isn’t off a conveyor belt

Strictly speaking, conveyor belts are for factories and airports, not restaurants. True, conveyor belts brought sushi to the masses, which is a good thing.

But to appreciate the sheer skill and artistry involved in real sushi, you have to visit a proper sushi restaurant. You’ll begin to understand the delicate balance between nature, texture, temperature and flavour that makes real sushi a genuine art form. And you won’t feel like you’re in a factory.

Caviar

You’re at a dinner party among esteemed guests. They start discussing caviar. You’d like to join in the conversation, but you’ve never had caviar. You feel embarrassed. How could you get to 35 without trying one of the world’s most coveted luxury foods? If you had, you’d be part of the cultured elite who know that the excruciatingly expensive sloppy black fish eggs taste like salt – a lot of salt – that’s been kept for a month in a trout’s pocket.

A meal cooked by a Michelin-star chef

Whether they’re a genuine mark of excellence, or just a glorified backslapping exercise, Michelin stars are what set the René Redzepis of this world apart from the Ronald McDonalds. Standards of service, hygiene and culinary artistry will almost certainly be as high as the bill. At the very least, it’s a chance to see what all the fuss is about and brag to your friends.

Something you’ve killed yourself

Most proud carnivores would kill for a juicy steak. Or would they? The uncomfortable truth about meat is that somebody has to slaughter it. So why shouldn’t it be you? You don’t have to bring down a wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti or wring the neck of a chicken in your backyard. Catching a fish will do. It’s edifying for a man to know he has the guts and respect to kill what he eats.

Real Wagyu beef

There’s no steak like the heavily marbled, intensely flavoursome meat of the Japanese Wagyu breed of cow. Much of it is reared in Australia and the US, but to experience the knee-bending pleasure of genuine Wagyu, you have to go Japanese. Look out for the Kobe, Matsusaka or Ohmi varieties, which all benefit from the unique terroir and intensive care of Japanese farms. Only then can you say you’ve had the best beef in the world.

Cassava

It’s estimated that over half a billion people around the world rely on cassava as a staple food. Unlike other staples such as rice, potatoes or maize, there’s a reason why you rarely see it in restaurants – it’s not very nice.

Often bitter or woody, it must be prepared carefully to remove toxins. But it keeps people alive. You should try it so you know what they have to put up with.

100 per cent cacao chocolate

Your idea of pure chocolate might be a Snickers cake with a Cadbury’s creme egg on top, but believe it or not, that’s about as far from real chocolate as Rolf Harris is from a carefree shower. With its bitter, leathery flavour, chocolate made with 100 per cent cacao (or cocoa) is a surprisingly intense experience, up there with smoking a fine cigar.

Something you’ve grown yourself

Just because you’re a clean-living vegetarian doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get your hands dirty. Growing and eating your own fruit, herbs or vegetables makes you appreciate the time, care and diligence required to put food on your table.

Converting your garden into an arable farm might be a turnip too far, but you can easily grow cherry tomatoes, coriander and even chillies on the hottest of desert balconies.

Something nasty

If you can eat fish-head curry while all those around you are losing their appetites; if you can confidently crack the shell of a balut egg, and not squeal at the downy duck embryo inside…

If you can stomach the stinking maggot-ridden cheese of casu marzu, or nibble deep-fried Thai cockroaches with pride; you’ll be able to convince your children to eat their salad, and everything that’s in it, and you’ll be a man, my son.

Something dangerous

Killing your own food is one thing – what about food that can kill you? Cheating death can be hungry work, so head to Japan and have fugu, or pufferfish, which contains a poison 1,200 times deadlier than cyanide.

Chefs undergo years of training to obtain a fugu licence, but that hasn’t stopped more than 20 fugu eaters dying in Japan since the turn of the century. Good luck!

A lot of chilli

It’s embarrassing for a man when his dinner-date is popping chillies like they were cherry drops, while he sits cowering in the corner sucking an ice cube with a wet towel on his head.

Also, chillies taste good. They’re in curry, peri-peri chicken and pretty much all Mexican food. If you haven’t built up a resistance to hot chillies by the time you’re 35, you probably never will.

Camel meat

To understand why the camel is regarded with such warmth and affection in the Gulf, you must eat its meat. A highly prized delicacy, camel meat is usually saved for special family occasions, such as births or weddings. If it’s a young one, the meat is tender and rich in flavour, and aside from the fatty hump, is generally leaner than most red meat.

Oysters

You can divide men into two categories. Those who can swallow oysters, and those who can’t. For the latter group, eating oysters is like swallowing a fisherman’s phlegm.

But for a real man, an oyster is a divine gift from the oceans, bursting with complex saline flavours, delivering a zinc blast that will keep him sharp and alert for whatever the night may yield.

Proper Parmesan

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must understand what proper Parmesan cheese is.

Parmigiano-Reggiano is a solid block of fragrant pressed cow’s milk cheese from certain regions of northern Italy – not the pre-shredded stuff in little cardboard tubes that looks and tastes like sweaty toe-hair dandruff. OK?

6 Reasons Why Artists Fail at Business

1) Artists want to create art, not run a business

Running a business has nothing to do with creating art. Nothing. Really, nothing. Do you want to create art for a living? If you do that is something you should come to terms with early on.

If that idea sounds horrible to you, don’t try to make a living being an artist. I mean that, you will be much happier going to a regular 9-5 job and doing your art on the side.

If you have no interest in running a business, don’t run a business! You will fail.

This has nothing to do with you as a person, it only has to do with what you want as a person. I suck at basketball, like a lot. It is damn embarrassing how bad I am at basketball. I once saw a basketball on a court and I swear it started rolling away on its own just to not be around me.

I am ok being horrible at basketball, because I have never once tried to be good at it. That isn’t really surprising is it? Something I have absolutely no desire to be good at, I am not good at.

If you have no desire to run a business well, you will not run a business well.

You have a couple of options here: Get someone else to run your business, or live the life of a starving artist.

2) Artists fight exactly what they need to do

Most often in business and in life the thing you don’t want to do is the thing you most need to do in order to succeed.

I am an artist, and trust me, this sucks. I know exactly what I want to do all the time: I want to stay in my studio and make art. I want the entire world to come to me offering opportunity. I want models to miraculously show up at my doorstep and ask if they can pay me to take photos of them.

I know this is ridiculous, it would never happen in real life. Now comes in all of the things you don’t really want to do. You want to get a client to hire you? Well you had better get out and start meeting a ton of people who have budgets. You would do well to make them like you too.

I have faced this dilemma many many times in my career – the struggle between being a business person and an artist.

I took this portrait of myself in 2008, and things haven’t really changed. It is still a struggle between myself as an artist and myself as a business person. To be honest, I have always put being an artist on some sort of pedastool. Like “ I am an artist, I shouldn’t have to do all that business stuff, that is for lame business people”.

I thought that by becoming a “business person” that I would lose my soul. I would lose what made me ME.

Little did I know but that attitude can get you in a lot of trouble. It turns out that business really isn’t that bad. Being good at business is a lot like being good at life. You don’t have to be “That Guy” and try to convince yourself and others that you are something you are not. Just find something you believe in, and tell people about it, you will be the greatest salesperson in the world because all you tell them will be true.

You have done this before. When you really wanted to see a movie, and you convinced your friends to go with you. When you made some awesome cookies and you got everyone around you to try them. When you told your friends about dropbox so they could sign up and you would get more storage. Guess what, you just became a sales person for Dropbox. If you are willing to do it for them, why not be willing to do it for yourself?

3) FEAR FEAR FEAR

Fear can be completely immobilizing. I am not speaking here of fear of spiders or snakes, those actually make sense. Having a healthy fear of snakes means you probably won’t be an idot and try to pick up a black mamba.

Most people have fears they aren’t fully aware of, and many of those people will never confront those fears. That is not really a problem if you don’t plan on pushing yourself, but if you want to make it as an artist and in business, one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself is to identify and face your fears.

In case you are reading this and saying to yourself “I don’t really have fear getting in the way of my success” you are either a total badass (think Blade or Marcel The Shell) or you haven’t really thought about it.

What keeps you from walking up to the hottest girl at the bar and introducing yourself? What stops you from giving the cute dude on the train your number? What stops you from eating yellow snow?

The same reasons may be what keep you from calling potential clients or sponsors on the phone and introducing yourself. The same reason may keep you from taking your life savings and investing it in your company. The same thing might be keeping you from quitting your day job to pursue your passion.

In the past year I have done all of these things, and they were ALL HARD AS HELL. Each decision scared me, and I spent a long time letting the fear control my actions. When I finally made the decision to change my life and face my fears, amazing things started to happen. Instead of me just thinking my life was going to magically get better on its own, it actually did get better.

One thing that has always helped me to face my fears is to think to myself. – What is the worst thing that could happen?

If you ask yourself this and answer honestly, you will probably find that the answer isn’t that bad. For me it was something like this: I would lose all that I own, become poor and have to live with my parents.

Then I thought to myself “It would be just like I was 17 again, I loved being 17!”. It made everything better. Going broke doesn’t mean I would forget everything that I have learned, and I am pretty confident that if I started at ZERO today, I could surpass where I am now in less than 1 year. Jobs come and go, so do possessions and just about everything else in life.

“The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you”

– Will Rogers

4) Artists forget about the little things (like taxes)

There are people who spend their entire lives learning how to start companies and run successful business and still fail. Don’t let your ignorance come back to haunt you.

Thankfully there is this great thing called the internet (Al Gore is the man) with answers for just about any question you may have.

Here are some things you really need to pay attention to:

Taxes – If you are working for yourself you are not exempt from income tax. What does this mean? You just photographed a wedding and collected $3,000 for a job well done; you can pay your bills and have a little left over to celebrate. Not quite, you really just made about $1,800 – $2,200 depending on how you file your dependencies. Minus the depreciation and cost of gear/travel and you are looking at actually making $1,500. HALF. This is pretty serious, don’t wait until your taxes are due to figure this out, it will kill your business!

Business Legal Structure – Depending on how you are going to structure your business (LLC vs Inc) you have some work to do here. My advice is to hire an attorney and an accountant – these people will not work for free. If you are curious Phlearn is set up as an LLC. We have 2 accountants and an attorney. Who do you think wrote this Terms of Service– Me?

Bookkeeping – If you are planning on just using your personal checking account to run a business, please don’t. Open a second account, and handle everything that is business related through that account. Even if you are the only one getting paid by your business, pay yourself out of this account. This will make your life much easier when it comes to doing taxes.

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”

– Benjamin Franklin

5) Artists think they can do everything themselves.

The problem is that usually they can, but that doesn’t mean they should.

Artists are stubborn people, I know, I am one. When an artist puts their mind to something, they will figure out how to make it work. It is that curiosity that has made them an artist in the first place.

Here is a simple rule, live by it and you will find success:Do what you are good at, and get other people to do the rest.

You don’t have to become an attorney to file all of your legal work, someone else is already an attorney. Do you really hate selling? Get someone else to do it. Hate brushing your teeth? Hire someone to brush them for you. Just don’t think that by not doing it that it doesn’t need to get done.

The biggest mistake you can make is by spending your time getting good at something you shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Someone else is already good at that, pay them to do it.

Think of your company as an airline. You may be the person who builds the plane, you may be the person who flies the plane, you may even be the dude holding the flags on the runway, but you can’t be all of them. Run your company as it would make sense on a large scale, figure out your role, figure out what other roles need to be filled, and go from there. Don’t have money to pay people? Get a loan or ask your rich uncle. If you are unwilling to do either of these things, you probably don’t believe in your own company.

6) Artists undervalue their work and skills/talent

You want to know how much your art/worth is worth? Exactly how much you say it is worth. If you don’t place value on your work, no one else will either.

Most of us started out making art because it was something we were passionate about, and we just wanted to create. I don’t know any artists who started out with money on their minds. For me personally, it was 2 years after first picking up a camera before I decided I was going to start charging for my art. This means that for 730 days, I was doing it just because I wanted to do it.

Most people see “work” as something they don’t want to do. In their heads “work” is worth money and “playing around” is not. This is why it is so hard for artists to place a price tag on their art, they would have done it even if they didn’t have to. Well I am here to tell you that just because that work you were doing didn’t suck, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t count as work. If you have years invested into your art, it has value.

Why is Godiva chocolate 5x more expensive that Hersheys? It is not 5 times better; in fact I like Dove Chocolate the best. They charge more because they tell you it is worth more. They place little chocolates delicately in a box of gold, adding nothing to the chocolate itself, only to the experience. You think you are getting something of value, and you are ok paying more for it.

People only know what you tell them. Put a fancy bow on your art, charge accordingly.

1 in 4 Swedish Women Will Be Raped as Sexual Assaults Increase 500%

Sweden’s population grew from 9 million to 9.5 million in the years 2004-2012, mainly due to immigration from “countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia”. 16 percent of all newborns have mothers born in non-Western countries. Employment rate among immigrants: 54 percent.

In 2003, Sweden’s rape statistics were higher than average at 9.24, but in 2005 they shot up to 36.8 and by 2008 were up to 53.2. Now they are almost certainly even higher as Muslim immigrants continue forming a larger percentage of the population.

With Muslims represented in as many as 77 percent of the rape cases and a major increase in rape cases paralleling a major increase in Muslim immigration, the wages of Muslim immigration are proving to be a sexual assault epidemic by a misogynistic ideology.

The statistics are skewed by urban centers where the Islamic colonists cluster. In Stockholm this summer there was an average of 5 rapes a day. Stockholm has gone from a Swedish city to a city that is one-third immigrant and is between a fifth and a quarter Muslim.

Sweden, like the rest of the West, will have to come to terms with the fact that it can either have female equality or Muslim immigration. It cannot have both.